MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations
nbcnewyork.com
nbcnewyork.com
Years later, I got a toll demand from an express lane around LA that had a false positive scan of my plate number—someone else’s partially obscured maybe?
I argued the car was registered elsewhere and wasn’t driven in CA, and they denied the appeal. I asked for evidence but they refused. I tried a FOIA request but it was denied because there’s an exemption for data that reveals individuals’ driving patterns—to get the photo I would have had to show up at an office in LA to show my ID and registration to prove it was my car, which it wasn’t!
CA law allows the plate scanning and dictates the toll violation letter must show the make and model of the vehicle in question. They just look up the DMV records for the scanned plate. They’re not doing any kind of verification that the vehicle matches. They have 100% faith in the infallibility of these scanners with no appeals process.
And I guess as they drive through 3 cameras that all made the same mistake, I received 3 notices of "Toll Evasion" on the same day for incidents that happened within a few hours of each other.
And the third included a notice that said as this was my third violation, they may file a lien against my vehicle and repossess it.
Sure, they immediately dropped them when I challenged them, but I often spend multiple months away from the country, I can certainly see me coming back to a repossessed car if I hadn't challenged it in the allowed time.
This may be an area where govt needs to set some kind of standard of talking to a live human and getting a straightforward explanation of why an appeal is denied. EU will probably lead the way if it happens.
I did once discover that in at least one jurisdiction criminal charges were not guaranteed a jury trial, only a bench trial was given. The judge in that circumstance is the prosecutor from another nearby jurisdiction.
I ran into the buzzsaw of Amazon's KDP self-publishing fraud detection bots, which decided that my Kindle was plagiarizing my paperback (duh, it's the same book). I went through a series of Kafkaesque email appeals — all denied with progressively vaguer justifications. By the final appeal, there was literally no concrete point left to even argue against, just vague wording about creating a negative experience for readers.
I'm not sure a human ever looked at my case. Or if they did, they had a huge incentive to just rubber-stamp the bot's decision and move on. The whole experience was soul-crushing, and I didn't even have that much at stake compared to some. I hope the architects and implementers of this system run into something similar someday so they know how it feels. The only recourse I've ever seen work is to tweet or create a blog post and have it go viral.
That's not a valid excuse for "due process" being completely unfair and placing unreasonable burdens on the accused.
What? In the US? Where?
TL;DR the Sixth's right to jury trial doesn't apply for criminal charges carrying less than sixth months maximum sentence—even if there are multiple such charges that may add up to more than that.
Gonna go out on a limb and guess that plenty of US jurisdictions don't voluntarily pay extra money to make those jury trials if they aren't forced to.
If they're triple billing you, they're triple billing someone else. That's worth an attorney's time.
I’m saying it might be. Being the lead plaintiff in even a threatened class can be lucrative.
That said, in their shoes, I’d write a letter to my state AG and copy my state legislative electeds and be done with it.
I had a false positive FasTrak ticket from the San Diego area for a timeframe I was living in Sacramento that was tossed (including gigantic late penalties) after a phone call explaining I was at work hundreds of miles away at the time.
I was all ready to go with Google Maps Timeline location data but they just took me at my word when they saw where the car was registered.
You probably got lucky and called in a month when budgets weren't tight and they weren't trying hard to squeeze out every penny so they just waved it instead of giving you the runaround.
Does every administrative process have to go to a plebiscite or a Judge to be valid? Where do you draw the line?
For adjudicating traffic tolls? Why do you think election is going to produce a good outcome? Some jurisdictions would collect zero revenue while others would refuse any appeal on principle.
I’m saying there are jurisdictions where this would be desirable to voters. Any area where most tickets are issued to non-locals, for example. If I were running in those races, I’d advertise my zero clemency attitude towards outsiders tearing up our streets or whatever.
Second part of San Diego County -- I believe they have a stated goal of tracking all vehicles at all times in some automated way.
He does.
"If you would like to appeal your ticket, press 2."
He presses 2.
"Your appeal has been [<1 second pause] denied. Thank you. Goodbye."
Wouldn't it have to hit a traffic court at some point?
If I did submit proof and they still denied it, I could request an administrative review, but first I have to pay the fine as a deposit, which would be refunded to me if I won.
Of course, all of the reviewers work for the organization whose scanners falsely accused me in the first place. There is no independent traffic court for this expressway.
Watching the reaction (they already had a couple of photos) was priceless. Said person questioned about 3 different groups (myself included) and all played dumb and had a good laugh when done. The vehicle owner saw the interaction from the farmer's market across the way and bought a round for a couple of tables.
Santa Cruz has a history of meter scofflawism - https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/mr-twister-s-mission-of-...
Don't be obtuse. It's not about the mechanization. It's about the capricious enforcement. If you weren't so blinded by bias you'd see that.
I hope you get dogpiled for jaywalking or some other "we only ever enforce it as a pretext" violation. It might knock your moral compass back into calibration.
People outside AI research expect good answers no matter what you give to AI.
Or to put it that way, wrong instructions are still natural intelligence related
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage
He is answering what a computation engine will do, but not what a "wise" person would do, which is the _the_ test of AI.
The goal of wisdom (and good teaching) is to first correct the faulty assumptions of the questioner that leads them to ask a bad question, and then once they ask a good question, then and _only_ then, provide the answer to the question.
However, I always wonder if the questioners might have suspected that the engine was a fake. The original Mechanical Turk was extent in around the same period, although I'm not sure when it's trick was uncovered.
In previous times, Alameda County special officers would issue $500 tickets for letting a passenger out of a private vehicle within a bus stop area. In case you don't know, the bus stops are everywhere, and often are large in busy downtown areas. The joke was that these special officers wore gold braids on their uniform, not to mark seniority, but to mark the amount of money generated !! Witnesses saw four or more tickets given out like that in one hour in a busy downtown area, on a certain day more than ten years ago.
To be blunt, tickets of that value, generated automatically for common violations, is a money printing machine. Alameda County Transit in California cannot be the only ones implementing this across the US and elsewhere.
Other comments in this thread complain about the difficulty of finding a legal place to drop people off at a BART station. That has not been my experience: the three Alameda county BART stations I’m most familiar with (Hayward, Fremont, and Warm Springs) all have passenger drop off zones and giant parking lots.
Can’t you drop a passenger off at a fire hydrant?
“CHAPTER 9. Stopping, Standing, and Parking
22514
No person shall stop, park, or leave standing any vehicle within 15 feet of a fire hydrant except as follows:
(a) If the vehicle is attended by a licensed driver who is seated in the front seat and who can immediately move such vehicle in case of necessity.”
That's still unacceptable, of course. But the proximate error here appears to not be with incorrect recognition, but with training/monitoring data accidentally being redirected to enforcement.
• The cameras issued 3,000 tickets which "should have been warnings."
• The cameras issued 800 tickets for "no infraction at all".
So out of 3,800 improperly issued tickets (!), under 25% went to people who were legally parked. The other 75% went to people who broke the law but should have been let off with a warning. As a bus rider, I don't feel so bad for them tbqh.
I don't think we know the total number of properly issued tickets from these cameras, but it's likely much higher!
> According to the New York City Department of Transportation, the city’s automated cameras – including red light cameras, speed cameras, and bus lane cameras – issue more than 40,000 violations per day.
That includes many more types of cameras, but it's also per day!
Describing it as if the AI is responsible is both clickbait and tends to absolve the humans involved. Allowing the MTA to frame it in this way is a failure of journalism.
How could it be $58k per bus to install a camera?
This is backed up by an earlier report on ABLE[1], which was the earlier program that this one (ACE) is built on: hardware was 1/3rd of the net cost to the MTA in that program.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bus-lane-camera-r...
Very profitable by the sounds of it!!!
* How many years of service are included (both for the data plan and just repairs when someone smashes a bus camera). Employing people to fix/replace cameras could easily cost hundreds of thousands per year
* Where does the video go? Redundant storage in geographically disparate areas?
* How long is video retained?
* R&D costs?
* Does the price include manual human review?
* There was also some drama where the 2 vendors sued each other, idk if that has any impact on the prices
* The tickets during the pilot made millions of dollars per year, do the cameras pay for themselves?
* How much efficiency are they gaining if the program results in fewer blocked busses?
And how long do those cameras last? The feds only fund bus replacements at twelve years or 500,000 miles.
The key is still to launch fast and iterate over bugs especially in the realm of traffic / parking violations which at the most causes annoyances to people ( I mean the same people are willing to sit in front of Holland Tunnel for an hour )
http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
There’s no reason this project had to issue parking violations from launch - it could issue soft warnings and get the same feedback from impacted civilians to fix the issues before causing them undue distress.
Honestly, why not? Let people take a photo of the offending vehicle, picture of the license plate and VIN number and tag the violation. Submit with a copy of your New York ID, and use that to filter out spam and nonsense reporters.
Hell, pay a bounty for submissions that result in the city collecting a fine. (You can deduct bad submissions from said bounties.)
I think it would also be weird to penalize people for reports that were ultimately un-actionable. Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism?
Why does it need to be a single photo?
> weird to penalize people for reports that were ultimately un-actionable
To the extent I suggested penalties, it's only in reducing bounties payable. That's less a penalty than recognition of costs.
Seems like the obvious solution is: multiple photos!
> Can you point to any government function that has a similar mechanism?
https://www.motortrend.com/news/nyc-idling-fine-citizen-repo...
Because that kind of thing leads to a lower-trust society, especially when plausibly motivated by personal financial gain
[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/nyc-anti-idling-la...
I can't imagine doing what that guy does at the scale he does. Like you can only wrong so many people until you run across the guy for whom you are the final straw. Though I guess that might be why he mostly runs a ring these days instead of being on the street.
I wouldn't risk it.
(The city has other, unincentivized, idling laws for other classes of vehicles.)
I was imprecise to lump them all together like that.
Pretty much everyone who depends on small business in NYC hates the government and law enforcement of NYC and sees them as revenuers (Louis Rossman covers this in detail on his youtube channel, to mention someone who's respected here on HN). The idea that someone would help them for a cut is incredibly disgusting to most people who live in this world.
It's incredibly foreseeable that some guy in the cab of a box truck who's distracted with his dispatch iPad looks up to see some guy taking pictures, puts two and two together and puts the truck in drive. They don't hire middle class techies to drive these trucks. Your morals don't translate to onto some 20yo guy from Newark. And they also don't translate into his hotheaded 16yo helper who runs with a less than law abiding crowd and you didn't see come out of the building just behind.
Like I said, the risk ain't worth my life.
> Like I said, the risk ain't worth my life.
Then don't take it! But I don't think the evidence supports treating the average truck driver as a psycho who's one idling ticket away from vehicular manslaughter.
Edit: as a case in point: Kuntzman[1] has been going around the city fixing car - including plenty of cop car - license plates for years. I think the worst he's gotten is verbal abuse, and he's doing something much more overt and aggressive.
[1]: https://www.curbed.com/2023/12/congestion-pricing-gersh-kunt...
You can always vote with your wallet and not use that corporation's roads
Like creating useless bus lanes? Then creating useless programs to write tickets to those "parked illegally" in bus lanes? Then creating useless digital waste finding a "better way" to write these pointless tickets over a pointless lane?
> The key is still to launch fast
The key is to get rid of things that don't work and can't provide worthwhile value to the _majority_ of tax payers.
By how much? 1%, 5%... or? It's measured so what's the measurement?
> and parking in them is in fact illegal
And all you have to prove this is a snapshot. Which are not accurate and is the basis for the entire thread here. And people who didn't commit any crime have been charged. So there is clearly an open question as to how many of these pictures appear to be illegal versus how many actually are.
> so why the air quotes?
Those are actual quotes and you've projected your assumptions into my actions. Did it harm your ability to understand what I wrote? If not then why make an issue of it?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scare%20quotes
While they may be “quotes” of stuff from the original (which that technically was) the intent was clear.
Furthermore, there's always someone who benefits and will lie with statistics to keep the gravy going.